23 April 2024: We are investigating problems with ecommerce on Cambridge Core. We apologise for any inconvenience and hope to have full functionality restored shortly.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 July 2013
Hans Urs von Balthasar claimed that Barth's Church Dogmatics demonstrates a weakening of his distinctive actualism in order to make space for ‘the concept of authentic objective form’, a point illustrated by the discourse on divine beauty in CD II/1. There Barth treats the divine being as an objective form to be contemplated, a seeming departure from Barth's privileged conceptualisation of God as personal subject whose free action humbles our theoretical gaze and graciously provides the material content for proper speech about God. Bruce McCormack has challenged von Balthasar's general thesis, arguing that no weakening has in fact taken place in the Church Dogmatics. If this is the case, what then of Barth's discourse on divine beauty? Is it consistent with his actualistic doctrine of God? Is it possible to speak of God both as a free, dynamic event and an object of beauty? Can theological aesthetics find a home within Barth's actualism? This article answers in the affirmative by demonstrating the systematic integrity between Barth's claims about divine beauty and the actualism permeating CD II/1. First, the article examines the ambiguity of Barth's specific claims about divine beauty. Barth is both enthusiastic and hesitant in speaking about divine beauty, affirming the concept yet placing careful qualifications on its use. Next, the article illustrates how the nature of these claims is anticipated by the actualism of CD II/1, specifically by (1) Barth's clear rejection of divine formlessness, (2) his argument that God's act of self-revelation in Jesus Christ implies an objective triune form for God's being and, lastly, (3) how he grounds discourse on divine beauty in the event of God's dynamic, free love. The article finally contends that the key to Barth's puzzling position on divine beauty is in understanding the precise reason why he registers beauty as a necessary but insufficient theological concept. This qualification is rooted in an important content–form, spirit–nature distinction which frames all discussion about God's being-in-act. Throughout CD II/1, objective form is a necessary condition for divine self-expression, but objectivity is always grounded in the freedom of the Spirit. Thus, the freedom-to-love at the heart of God's triune existence is the ground of our experience of God as beautiful, not any continuity with our contemplation of created forms. As such, the creative freedom animating God's triune life provides the space for, but also the limit to, theological aesthetics by imbuing divine beauty in mystery.
1 Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, II/1, trans. T. H. L. Parker et al., ed. Bromiley, G. W. and Torrance, T. F. (London: T&T Clark, 1957)Google Scholar. When appropriate, the original German from Kirchliche Dogmatik, II/1 (Zollikon-Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag A.G., 1946) will also be cited.
2 Hunsinger, George, How to Read Karl Barth (New York: OUP, 1991), p. 30Google Scholar.
3 Barth, CD II/1, p. 257.
4 Hunsinger, How to Read, p. 30.
5 For von Balthasar's ‘conversion’ thesis, cf. The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), pp. 86–167. Originally published in 1951 by Verlag Jakob Hegner.
6 Balthasar, Von, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1, Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, ed. Fessio SJ, J. and Riches, J. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), p. 56Google Scholar. Originally published in 1961 by Johannes Verlag.
7 CD II/1, p. 641.
8 Ibid., p. 643.
9 Ibid., p. 646.
10 Ibid., p. 648.
11 Cf. respective citations in Clark, M. and Thyen, O. (eds), Concise Oxford-Duden German Dictionary, 3rd edn (Oxford: OUP, 2005)Google Scholar.
12 CD II/1, p. 649.
13 Ibid., p. 650.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., pp. 650–1.
18 Ibid., p. 655.
19 Ibid., p. 651.
20 Ibid., p. 653.
21 Ibid., p. 651.
22 Ibid., p. 655.
23 Ibid., p. 652.
24 Ibid., p. 654.
25 Ibid., p. 659.
26 Emphasis mine. Ibid., p. 666; KD II/1, p. 745.
27 Von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, pp. 118–19.
28 CD II/1, p. 657.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., pp. 657–8.
32 Ibid., p. 659.
33 Ibid., p. 660: ‘without pre-eminence or subordination but not without succession and order, yet without any jeopardizing or annulment of the real life of the Godhead’. This nicely fits into von Balthasar's description of Barth's use of dialectical: ‘Thus the methodological contradiction becomes a pointer to God, who contains within himself no insoluble paradox or logical contradiction, even in the mystery of his trinitarian nature. God is a mystery, not a paradox’ (The Theology of Karl Barth, p. 78).
34 CD II/1, p. 661; KD II/1, p. 745.
35 CD II/1, p. 665.
36 Ibid., p. 663.
37 ‘He is One and yet another, but One again even as this other, without confusion or alteration, yet also without separation or division’ (ibid., p. 664).
38 Ibid., p. 662.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., p. 666.
41 David Bentley Hart is representative here of one who draws a general principle of analogy from the incarnation: ‘For Christian thought there lies between idolatry and the ethical abolition of all images the icon, which redeems and liberates the visible, and of which the exemplar is the incarnate Word: an infinite that shows itself in finite form without ceasing to be infinite – indeed, revealing its infinity most perfectly thereby’ (The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 15).
42 Emphasis mine. CD II/1, p. 665.
43 Von Balthasar exegetes Barth's section on beauty in Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, Seeing the Form, pp. 53–7, and vol. 7, Theology: The New Covenant, trans. Brian McNeil and ed. John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), pp. 21–4, of his magisterial theological aesthetics. Barth's section on divine beauty arguably remains their greatest point of contact as Fergus Kerr has suggested that ‘it is not absurd to see Balthasar's magnificent attempt, in Herrlichkeit, to expound a theology centred on the glory of God, as an extension of Barth's reflections on the beauty of God in Church Dogmatics . . . in effect, Herrlichkeit is a slow, patient and much more elaborate working out of Barth's conception of the divine beauty’ (‘Foreword: Assessing this “Giddy Synthesis”’, in L. Gardner, D. Moss, B. Quash and G. Ward (eds), Balthasar at the End of Modernity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), pp. 9–10).
44 KD II/1, p. 746.
45 Von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, p. 57.
46 Ibid., p. 56.
47 Hunsinger, How to Read, p. 30.
48 Von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, p. 56.
49 Cf. McCormack, Bruce, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
50 Barth, Karl, The Epistle to the Romans, 6th edn, trans. Edwyn Hoskyns (London: OUP, 1933), p. 29Google Scholar.
51 McCormack, Barth's Dialectical Theology, p. 461.
52 Cf. ibid., p. 459.
53 CD II/1, p. 272.
54 ‘Such initial steps [toward a theological aesthetics] find their full form in Karl Barth's isolated treatise on God's glory and (therein) his beauty’ (von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 7, p. 21). ‘Isolated treatise’ is potentially misleading, hiding the fact that Barth's claims about glory and beauty are systematically prepared for and thus anticipated throughout CD II/1.
55 Von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, p. 80.
56 Cf. CD II/1, p. 5.
57 Hunsinger, How to Read, p. 32.
58 Pelikan, Jaroslav, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 2, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 263Google Scholar. My account of Palamas relies upon Pelikan's acute exposition.
59 Cf. ibid., p. 266.
60 Emphasis mine. From Gregory Palamas, The Triads, as found in Thiessen, Gesa E., ed., Theological Aesthetics: A Reader (London: SCM Press, 2004), p. 98Google Scholar.
61 Pelikan, Spirit of Eastern Christendom, p. 265.
62 CD II/1, p. 332.
63 Pelikan, Spirit of Eastern Christendom, p. 269. In original citation, the Greek form of ‘varied’ and ‘simple’ appears.
64 Cf. CD II/1, p. 267.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 As Barth argues, ‘the divine being must be allowed to transcend both spirit and nature, yet also to overlap and comprehend both’ (ibid., p. 266).
68 Cf. Hunsinger, How to Read, pp. 35–9.
69 CD II/1, p. 469.
70 Ibid., p. 468.
71 Ibid., p. 469.
72 Ibid., p. 473.
73 Cf. ibid., p. 619.
74 Ibid., p. 612.
75 Ibid., p. 615.
76 Ibid., p. 639.
77 Ibid., p. 615.
78 Ibid., p. 620.
79 Ibid., p. 49.
80 Ibid.
81 Viladesau, Richard claims that ‘Barth's reservations about theological attention to the beautiful stem from a fear of religious “aestheticism”’ (Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art (New York: OUP, 1999), p. 28CrossRefGoogle Scholar) and then cites Barth's claim in CD I/2 where Barth declares that ‘the Church attitude precludes . . . the possibility of a dogmatics which thinks and speaks aesthetically’, in Church Dogmatics, I/2, trans. G. T. Thomson and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), p. 841.
82 ‘In our discussion of the leading concepts of the Christian knowledge of God, we have seen that no single one of them is the key, and that if any one of them is claimed as such it inevitably becomes an idol.’ CD II/1, p. 652.
83 Ibid., p. 267; KD II/1, p. 299.
84 CD II/1, p. 267.
85 Hunsinger, How to Read, p. 41.
86 CD II/1, p. 272.
87 Ibid., p. 267.
88 Emphasis mine. Von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, p. 32.
89 CD II/1, p. 257; KD II/1, p. 288.
90 Ibid., p. 18.
91 CD II/1, p. 3. I am grateful for the comments of George Hunsinger on an earlier draft of this article.
